“Yes, we talked for a few minutes.”
“Was his daughter there?”
Deborah thought a minute, then said, “Sorry, Mayleen. I can’t remember. We used the same restroom, but I didn’t see her after that. I think she probably left.”
“Did you see anyone at all go back upstairs?”
“Not up the staircase, but the elevator wasn’t visible from the waiting room. If it’s any help, though, Collins was still talking to my sister-in-law Minnie a little while after Aunt Rachel’s aide came down to eat, so I really doubt he’s who you’re looking for.”
“What about these two nieces of yours?”
“Emma and Jess? They were there, but I think they left early before we knew about Aunt Rachel.”
“And Furman Snaveley?”
“Who? Oh, the preacher. I don’t remember seeing him downstairs.”
Armed with a photograph of the Reverend Furman Snaveley that Mayleen had printed from the DVD, Raeford McLamb and Tub Greene parked the cruiser under the hospital’s covered entryway out of the rain. Major Bryant had not told them why the old man might have a motive for murder, merely that he wanted to know if Snaveley had an alibi. They knew that Snaveley had left the hospice room with the Byrds and had walked out of the hospital through the main doors, then immediately returned, ostensibly to use the restroom.
A friendly middle-aged black woman sat behind the information counter opposite those doors. “Yes, I was here last Wednesday afternoon,” she told them, and looked long and hard at the picture they showed her.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I remember him now. That tie he’s wearing. You can’t really tell in this picture, but it was dark red, embroidered with little tiny gold crosses, and I was thinking a tie like that would make a good Father’s Day present for my dad. He asked me where the men’s room was and I told him down that hall, first door on the right.”
She gestured toward her left, in the opposite direction from the hospice wing.
“Did you see him come back?”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
“But you saw him start down that hall?”
“That’s right.”
“Where’s the nearest elevator from here?” they asked.
“Besides that one?” She gestured toward an elevator that was in her line of sight near the front entrance.
“Do you think you would’ve noticed if he got on it?” McLamb asked.
“Maybe. Especially if he had to wait, because that surely is the slowest elevator in the building.”
“What about down that hall past the restroom? Where’s the next elevator that way?”
“Not too far. See the second crossing down yonder? If you turn left, you’ll walk right into it.”
They thanked her and started timing the walk.
“You reckon he’d walk this fast?” asked Tub Greene, who still carried an extra thirty pounds of baby fat and sometimes had trouble keeping up with McLamb, who was lean and fit.
“He would if he was in a hurry to put a pillow over somebody’s face,” McLamb said. But he slowed his steps. The elevator arrived and they went up to the third floor, then walked down branching corridors toward the hospice wing. Four and a half minutes. Again, they were lucky. Two nurses sat at that last station in the newer hall making notations on their electronic charts, one a young blue-eyed white woman, the other an older brown-eyed man of Japanese descent. Both had been on duty the previous Wednesday. But there the luck ended. Neither of them recognized Snaveley’s picture.
“We were right busy that afternoon,” said the senior nurse. McLamb was disconcerted to hear the nurse’s Southern drawl when he was expecting a foreign accent. “A lot of coming and going. We had a code about that time. One of our patients down on C Hall went into cardiac arrest and his wife freaked out. I thought we were going to have to sedate her before we could get him stabilized. A marching band could have gone past this station for all I know.”
The young white nurse agreed.
McLamb thanked them and went on down the corridor and around the corner to the elevator that serviced the old wing. The desk there was unstaffed, as it had been last week.
“Okay,” said Ray McLamb. “Snaveley and the Byrds left the room with the others. They then took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked through the halls to the main entrance, where their cars were parked.”
“And don’t forget that they would be talking as they went,” said Tub. He looked at his watch. “Say ten minutes to get down and outside, then another five or six minutes for him to get in and back up, and that’s not counting if he really did have to use the men’s room. Yet nobody saw him.”
“So I guess we drive over to Raleigh and ask him if he saw anybody after he left the Byrds,” said Ray.
It was still raining when Dwight got to the Sterling home, but Billy Thornton was seated on the porch swing as before and seemed to be enjoying the sound of rain as it drummed on the roof and sluiced down onto the late azaleas that lined the foundation of the house with bright red blossoms.
“Daddy, this is Major Bryant from the Sheriff’s Department,” said Mrs. Sterling.
“Come to arrest me, young man?” he asked jovially.
Encouraged, Dwight said, “No, I brought you some music to listen to.”
“Do you want me to stay?” his daughter asked. “I never know if I’m a help or a hindrance at times like this.”
“Why don’t I call you if I need you?” Dwight said, relieved that he wouldn’t have to sugarcoat what he planned to ask.
“I’ll leave the door open,” she said and disappeared inside.
Dwight cued up the first song on Deborah’s playlist, Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You.” A few bars into the song, Billy Thornton began to tap his foot in time with the music.
“Yeah, I like this one,” he said with a happy smile on his face.
Next came a short Eddie Arnold cut, then a warm baritone voice began to sing about racing with the moon and Dwight realized that Deborah had chosen period love songs of adolescent loss and longing. He lowered the volume a little and softly asked, “You have a girlfriend?”
Thornton shrugged.
“C’mon, Billy. There must be someone special. Is it Letha?”
Dwight held up the snapshot of Letha McAllister that Mayleen had enlarged. “Remember, Billy?”
“Letha!” He reached for the picture and held it in both hands. Tears filled his rheumy eyes. “Letha,” he whispered, then looked at Dwight angrily. “Where’d you get her picture?”
“Jacob Knott gave it to me,” Dwight said. “She gave it to him.”
“The hell you say!” His eyes went back to the photograph and resentment faded from his face, replaced by wonder. “Lord, but she was something else, won’t she? You remember how she laughed?”
“Real pretty,” Dwight said, realizing that the old man thought he was someone from out of a shared past. “But she liked Jacob best, didn’t she?”
Thornton didn’t answer.
“Down at Possum Creek, Billy. You and Jacob and Letha. Did you hit Jacob?”
“We all…me, Ransom, Jed. She let us all kiss her, but Jacob…She let Jacob—”
“How did Jacob die, Billy?” Dwight asked, his voice barely audible above the music.
“Always showing off, won’t he? Swinging out on that rope, flipping off like he was Tarzan on a jungle vine. Laughing at me and Ransom ’cause we couldn’t do it as good. And Letha looking at him like he was made out of sugar candy.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She saw me.”
“Saw you doing what?”
“He fell. The rope broke.”
“And you hit him with a rock because he wanted Letha, too.”
“No! I didn’t.”
“What did she see you do, Billy?”
“She didn’t know I was up there when she— She went right into the water and let him put his hand— She never let me touch her like that. She saw me out on that li
mb. Her and Jacob. They thought I was using my knife to pull the knot tighter.”
Bing Crosby’s mellow voice gently caressed a lovesick lyric.
“I didn’t mean for him to get hurt so bad, but he wouldn’t quit trying to take her away from me.”
“So you cut the rope,” Dwight said softly.
“She’s my girl, dammit! Mine! It was all her fault!” His fingers clinched around the edges of the enlarged photograph and his eyes seemed to focus on the sexy image. “Letha,” he whimpered.
“Tell me about Jacob,” Dwight said, but Thornton sat mutely through two more songs that had been popular when he and Letha McAllister and Jacob Knott had been young and reckless.
If Thornton had all his marbles, thought Dwight, I could arrest him. Now, though?
He sighed, switched off the music, and reached for the photograph.
Thornton snatched it away and pulled back his fist. Dwight ducked, but not before a surprisingly hard blow landed on his shoulder.
“Get the hell off my porch!” the old man yelled in such a loud voice that Mrs. Sterling came rushing out.
“Dad? What’s wrong?”
Flushed with rage, Thornton struggled to his feet, clearly intending to slug it out.
“Dad!” Mrs. Sterling cried, and as abruptly as the anger had come, it was already ebbing away and the old man looked at her in confusion. Without protest, he let her help him sit down on the swing. The chain creaked as he began to rock back and forth, soothed by the falling rain.
“Mamie?” he said. “Is it suppertime yet?”
“Not yet, Dad.”
The picture had landed under the swing and Mrs. Sterling picked it up.
“Is this that Letha you were asking about?” She handed it to Dwight. “She looks like one of those old movie stars from back when I was a kid. What was her name? Betty Grable? Was she his girlfriend?”
“He thought so.” Unbidden, came a line one of his Army Intelligence colleagues always quoted when he was in his cups: “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”
He did not realize he’d spoken aloud until Mrs. Sterling looked at him curiously.
“Major Bryant?”
“Sorry,” he said and slid the photograph back into his folder. Mr. Thornton did not seem to notice.
“Was he able to tell you anything useful?”
“Yes, ma’am. I got what I came for and I won’t be bothering you again.”
“No bother,” she said brightly. “Dad and I are always happy to have company. Breaks up the day.”
CHAPTER
24
Old men who are moderate in their desires, and are neither testy nor morose, find old age endurable.
— Cicero
Wednesday afternoon (continued)
Cameron Longview was one of Raleigh’s older continuous-care retirement communities. Located inside the Beltline on the west side of town, the campus consisted of several two- and three-story gray stone buildings set in a grove of huge live oaks.
And here on a rainy spring afternoon, it did indeed look more like a university campus than a modern retirement village, thought Ray McLamb. Duke, maybe. Or Oxford.
Although his wife seldom watched supposedly true-to-life cop shows set in New York or LA, she had been addicted to the Inspector Morse series and she always watched the reruns, as much for the architecture of Oxford as for the stories. They lived in a comfortable brick house with all the modern conveniences, yet she yearned for multi-paned leaded windows set deeply into thick stone walls.
Lillie would like this place, he thought.
The buildings were connected by covered walkways and their graceful wrought-iron columns were corded with wisteria vines that dripped huge purple clusters. Sturdy teak benches offered comfortable seating sheltered from spring rain or summer sun.
According to the brochure the deputies had picked up at the main office, Cameron Longview offered one- and two-bedroom garden apartments for independent living, efficiency apartments for assisted living, and hospital rooms for skilled nursing care when the need arose. As Ray navigated the drive that wound between the buildings, Tub read aloud from the brochure.
“Sumptuous cuisine. Evening cocktails on the terrace overlooking the garden. Cultural events. Aquatic and fitness center. On-site hospital facility. Adult day care.”
“If you have to get old, this is the place to do it.” With a touch of sadness, he thought, Sorry, Lillie. Our retirement fund’ll never stretch this far.
“Bet it costs a fortune,” Tub Greene said, echoing Ray’s thoughts. “Where does a retired preacher get the money for a place like this? Don’t you have to buy your apartment and then pay a monthly charge?”
“Maybe he has a wealthy son or something.”
The curving roadways widened in various places, permitting those who could still drive to park near the entrances of their quarters. Ray eased the cruiser to a stop beneath tall rain-drenched oaks next to a small porch where an old man with stooped shoulders waited for them, alerted by the staff member who had given them directions.
“Come in, come in!” he called, urging them out of the rain as they splashed across the wet grass. “You’d be surprised how many people get lost trying to find me. But here you are!”
His long narrow face was made longer by a hairline that had receded to the crown of his head. The white hair across the top was so thin that his scalp shone through and he wore round rimless bifocals. Ray noticed a slight tremor in his hands when they shook.
Once inside and the introductions were over, he said, “I just made a fresh pitcher of lemonade. Let me get y’all some.”
As Snaveley pottered with glasses, napkins, and a plate of oatmeal cookies—“They bake them fresh for us every day,” he said—Ray reflected that the small room did have the cozy ambience of an Oxford don’s study: oak desk and sturdy captain’s chairs, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a couch and wing chair upholstered in soft mellow colors. The rain that beat against the leaded panes of the tall mullioned windows only added to the coziness.
“I don’t think we’ve met before,” he told Ray, “but what about you, Deputy Greene? Any of your people ever attend Bethany?”
Tub shook his head.
Ray did not take offense. Things were slowly changing, but as Martin Luther King once observed: “The most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.” All those years and it was still true. If any of his family had sat in the Bethany congregation back when Snaveley was pastor, the old man would surely have remembered.
“Now how can I help you young fellows?” Snaveley asked.
Ray took a bite of the cookie. It was moist and chewy, studded with plump raisins. “We’re trying to get a fix on who was in Rachel Morton’s room last Wednesday and when they left.”
“Our alibis?” The word seemed to amuse him.
“Well, take you, for instance,” Ray said. “Mrs. Byrd says you and some others walked out of the hospital together?”
He nodded.
“So that alibis them, but then you went back into the hospital?”
“To use the restroom. Yes.”
“Did you see anyone you knew when you came back out?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. At the next urinal. Marvin Galloway. We served on a church council together about twenty years ago. His granddaughter had just had a baby boy and he and his wife were on their way up to see her.”
Tub jotted down Galloway’s name. Snaveley thought he lived in Dobbs, but wasn’t sure.
“Did you see anyone from Mrs. Morton’s room when you went out to your car?”
“No, I’m sorry. Galloway’s the only one I saw. Shocking to think that Rachel Morton was smothered like that so near to the natural end of her life.”
“Can you think of any reason she was?” Ray asked.
“Not a thing. She was a fine woman. Of course, I hadn’t seen much of her these last few years. Weddings and funerals, I’
m afraid.”
“We’re thinking that perhaps someone was afraid she was going to say something damaging.”
Snaveley frowned. “I doubt that. As I recall, Rachel loved to talk and tell stories, but never mean ones, and if there was anything embarrassing about her stories, she never gave enough details for you to figure out who she meant.”
“We’ve heard that, too,” Ray said, “but some of the things she talked about last week were things her family didn’t recognize. I’ve got a list of them here. Maybe you could help us with them. How long were you there?”
“Twenty-six years.”
“Not her church,” said Ray. “In her room.”
“Oh, sorry. I arrived a little after five and was there until the drink got spilled on the bed and we all left. Perhaps six thirty?”
Ray smoothed out one of the sheets Mayleen had given them. “She said that someone had signed what sounds like a promissory note, but that he never paid the debt. She mentioned that two or three times.”
“A promissory note? No, that doesn’t ring a bell.”
“What about a cowbird egg?”
Snaveley’s long face lit up with a gentle smile. “Human nature being what it is, that could apply to at least half a dozen families I’ve known over the years, but please don’t ask me for names.”
“Were any of them in Mrs. Morton’s room that afternoon?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not that I know of, but a lot of the people were strangers to me.”
“She kept going back to that fire,” Ray said.
“And the drowning,” Tub added as he reached for a third cookie.
“Rachel’s brothers? Yes, that happened before she married and moved her membership to Bethany, so I never knew those boys, but it did prey on her mind at times.”
“Like the house that caught fire?”
“Such a tragedy. And so hard on Rachel because she had been over just that morning to take Jannie some tangerines. It was her family custom to buy a crate of them every Christmas and share them out. And then to look out her back window and see the house on fire? By the time she and her husband and the other neighbors got there, it was too late. Nobody could get through those flames. Heart pine, you know. Lightwood. Fat with resin. Might as well’ve been drenched in kerosene. Once heart pine starts burning, you can’t put it out, and the nearest fire department was seven miles away.”
Designated Daughters Page 17
